25 Free SEO Tools to Drive Traffic and Sales
I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy alongside your content strategy when creating content online.
Because without a proper SEO strategy, your business is virtually invisible. So how can you get your SEO game right?
It starts with having the right tools.
And it’s even better when those tools are free.
There are literally hundreds of free SEO tools out there, but I want to focus on only the best and most useful to add to your toolbox.
I’ve gathered a big sampling of the best free SEO tools on the market — tools with a wide variety of uses and covering a number of common needs. These tools are fast, free, and easy to use.
All of these tools work great in 2022.
Here’s a breakdown of 25 of the best free SEO tools.
1. Answer The Public
Answer the Public pulls the questions people are asking from Google’s autocomplete results. It’s super useful for generating topic ideas.
Enter any relevant keyword, and Answer the Public will provide a huge list of long-tail keyword opportunities, plus common questions asked.
2. Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator
Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator is one of the free tools offered by Ahrefs. It pulls the top 100 keyword ideas for any seed keyword or phrase from their database of over ten billion keywords across 170+ countries.
It shows the estimated monthly search volume for each suggestion, plus Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores for the first ten ideas.
3. Google Analytics
Quite possibly the most powerful free analytics tool available, Google Analytics tracks pretty much every bit of traffic you can imagine on your website — where it comes from, which page is receiving it and so on.
While it’s not purely for SEO, it’s still a helpful tool to track if you’re getting traffic from organic search.
4. SEMrush
SEMrush needs no introduction. SEMrush has a free version of its robust tool. Not just for link building, SEMrush can provide help with keyword research, on-page SEO audits, content optimizations, rank tracking and much more.
5. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is an all-in-one SEO tool designed to help you win the game of SEO. Neil Patel took over Ubersuggest not long ago and gave it a major overall.
A big part of SEO success is knowing what you’re doing, what your competitors are doing, and how to adjust your strategy to take advantage of holes in the market. Ubersuggest draws a picture of all of that.
6. Google Ads Keyword Planner
Enter a keyword or group of keywords into the tool, and Google Keyword Planner will return all sorts of helpful stats to guide your keyword strategy: monthly search volume, competition, and even suggested terms you might not have considered.
7. Keyword Surfer
Keyword Surfer is a free Chrome Extension that shows estimated global and monthly search volumes for any query typed into Google. You can also see similar keywords and related terms in the sidebar.
This makes it easy for you to do keyword research and competitive analysis without leaving the SERPs.
8. SEObility
SEObility crawls your entire site and lets you know about search engine optimization issues like slow-loading pages, blocked pages, sitemap problems, technical SEO issues and lots more.
You usually only get this type of stuff from paid SEO tools. So it’s really nice that Seobility gives you this data for free.
9. Google My Business
This is a must-have tool for Local SEO — especially if you live in a market served by Google. It allows you to claim your business, manage listing information, and respond to reviews — among other things.
Claiming your business profile forms the foundation of most other local SEO activities, so it’s an essential step.
10. Google Trends
Google Trends shows the popular search terms over time, which is useful for uncovering seasonal variations in search popularity amongst other things. Compare multiple terms to see the relative popularity.
11. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a desktop-based website crawler. It’s one of the most popular tools available for analyzing and auditing technical and on-page SEO issues.
With the free version, you can crawl up to 500 URLs.
12. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test checks how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device. It also identifies specific mobile-usability issues like text that’s too small to read, the use of incompatible plugins, and so on.
With Google’s move to mobile-first indexing, having a responsive website is more important than ever.
13. Yoast SEO
Enter the main keyword for your blog post and Yoast SEO will suggest how to tweak your blog post to optimize it for search engines.
14. Google Search Console
Google Search Console gives you a taste of what the most used search engine thinks of your website.
You can use it to check and fix technical issues on your website, see important SEO data like clicks, impressions and average ranking position, submit sitemaps and more.
15. Marketing Miner
Marketing Miner has a low profile in the United States, but it’s one of the best-kept secrets of Eastern Europe.
If you need to pull a lot of SERP data, rankings, tool reports, or competitive analysis, Marketing Miner does the heavy lifting for you and loads it all into convenient reports.
Check out this list of miners for possible ideas. It’s a paid tool, but the free version allows to perform a number of tasks.
16. Local Search Results Checker
BrightLocal’s Local Search Results Checker shows you search results from any location — down to the city, town, or even ZIP level.
Depending on the country, you can even specify the language.
17. Moz Local Listing Score
Moz crunches data from more than 10 different sources — including Google, Yelp, and Facebook — to score your brick-and-mortar business on how it looks online.
Results come complete with actionable fixes for inconsistent or incomplete listings.
18. Small SEO Tools
Small SEO Tools is a favourite among old-time SEO. It comprises a collection of over 100 original SEO tools. Each tool performs a very specific task.
What’s great about this collection is that in addition to more traditional toolsets like backlink and keyword research, you’ll find an abundance of hard-to-find and very specific tools such as proxy tools and pdf tools.
19. Copyscape
Enter a URL for a blog post or website, and Copyscape can tell you where else that content exists online. You might find results that you’ll need to follow up with to help get your SEO in order.
20. Keyword Hero
Keyword Hero attempts to replace the “(not provided)” data in Google Analytics with real search keywords.
The free tier allows you to analyze up to 10 URLs and 2,000 sessions per month.
21. BuzzSumo
As an SEO research tool, BuzzSumo is awesome. Its Chrome extension is one of the few tools available that deliver reliable social share count estimates for any piece of content.
You don’t get as much data with a free account, but you still get access to top content and trending data. One of my favourite tools.
22. Cloudflare
There are so many good things to say about Cloudflare, it’s difficult to know what to include here. Aside from a free CDN to speed up your site, it also allows for easy DNS management, and 100 percent free DDoS protection.
You can run on a free plan forever, but if you’re ready to upgrade, the pro features are super cool and amazingly affordable.
23. Exploding Topics
SEOs often target topics with high search volume, but that means targeting topics that are already popular. What if you could find and target topics right before they hit the mainstream?
Use Exploding Topics to do that.
24. Website Authority Checker
Enter your URL and see the Domain Rating (DR) of your website. Generally speaking, the higher the number, the more authoritative your website.
A high DR has been shown to correlate positively with higher Google rankings.
25. Page Speed Insights
Page Speed Insights is another Google tool built on top of Lighthouse, with one key added metric: Field Data. Field Data uses metrics collected by the Chrome User Experience Report so you can see how your page performs with real users across the globe.
Conclusion
I hope this article demonstrates that you can do a lot with free SEO tools.
These free SEO tools will get you started, and a few of them are pretty powerful.
Throw in some social media keyword search tools and you’ll be able to cast an even broader net to learn more about what your audience wants.
Did I miss any awesome free SEO tools? Let me know in the comment below.
